Newspapers

The question

Politicians often tweet about newspapers, either by directly linking to a story or by re-tweeting a newspaper's tweet of a story. Knowing which newspapers politicians link to gives insight both into (a) what they read and (b) their worldview. For example, Donald Trump is well-known for tweeting stories from Fox News, a right-wing news outlet.

Among Catalan and Spanish politicians, what is the distribution of newspaper articles?

The methods

We gathered 814632 tweets from 58 well-known Catalan and Spanish politicians. We algorithmically identified references to 40 newspapers, and calculated the percentage of references to each for each politician.

Results

Highlights

• ABC is a favorite of the right, but especially Pablo Casado: Pablo Casado % tweeted about ABC articles in 9% of his tweets, followed by España Ciudadana and Societat Civil Catalana.
• The cross-over between newspapers of preference for the Partido Popular, Ciudadanos and SCC was high: for example, El Confidencial, El Español, El Mundo, E-noticies, OKDiario saw high reference rates from politicians in these groups.
• The cross-over between newspapers of preference for pro-independence politicians was also high: Ara, CCMA, Vilaweb, and local newspapers saw high reference rates from politicians in these groups.
• El País had the highest overall reference rates (7.48% of all tweets containing any link or tag).
• Where unionist and independentist groups overlapped, it was generally politicians of ERC, Comuns and Socialists: for example, with high rates of El Diario and Público.

By politician

The below shows the top 10 newspaper re-tweets for each politician.

By newspaper

The below shows the top 10 re-tweeters for each newspaper (relative to each person's overall tweet-load).

Charts in Catalan

By politician

The below shows the top 10 newspaper re-tweets for each politician.

By newspaper

The below shows the top 10 re-tweeters for each newspaper (relative to each person's overall tweet-load).

Details

Code

All code for this analysis is openly available at https://github.com/joebrew/vilaweb/tree/master/inst/rmd/newspapers.